MARCH 2020
New American Funding
Customer Spotlight
When New American Funding (NAF) founders Rick and Patty Arvielo wanted a new way to manage their online reputation and increase the volume of new local business for their loan officers, they turned to Experience.com.
NAF is a mortgage lender headquartered in California with more than 180 locations across the country. The company’s loan officers are the primary point of contact with NAF’s customers seeking the American Dream of buying a home. Throughout the mortgage process, loan officers need to build relationships with real estate agents, CPAs and attorneys while always keeping their focus on winning their local markets to originate new business.
New American Funding already had several in-house developers focused on creating a better way of obtaining and using customer reviews as an online reputation tool. In fact, they already had a working system for collecting reviews since customer feedback and brand reputation are so important to the company’s competitive advantage. However, the co-founders agreed to a pilot project with Experience.com.
“Patty and I already recognized the power of reviews and their effectiveness for attracting new business, so we were open to running a pilot to learn what more Experience.com could do for NAF,” said Rick Arvielo. “We had our own statistics, and we were curious to see how the results of Experience.com’s pilot would compare to what we were getting from our in-house system. Immediately we saw the potential to help our loan officers deliver the best customer experience and gain new local business.”
Milestone results came quickly for NAF after the implementation of Experience.com’s experience management platform. NAF generated 35,000 customer reviews in just the first 18 months! Previously, the company’s 1,000+ loan officers had fewer than 4,000 reviews across websites like Zillow, Google and BBB, and fewer than 500 Google reviews. As of January 2020, NAF had nearly 95,000 reviews, including over 7,167 on Zillow, plus another 3,504 on Google My Business and Credit Karma. Their average score across all these reviews is 4.88 stars and a Net Promoter Score of 89. Their survey completion rate is an unprecedented 60%.
NAF clearly realized the value of Experience.com when management compared the company’s current results with those of two of its competitors using different, much narrower and less automated platforms. All companies started their campaigns around the same time (January 2017) and the numbers speak for themselves:
“Experience.com empowers our loan officers across our 189 branches to capture the voice of the customer through surveys and reviews and then automatically share it an average of 8 times online,” says Rick Arvielo. “The surveys are sent out as if they are coming directly from the loan officer after the closing, and that humanizes and personalizes the experience so both the NAF employee and the customer are more engaged.”
“NAF took charge of their online reputation,” says Scott Harris, CEO of Social Survey. “They were already creating WOW-worthy customer experiences. They just needed to activate their customers with an automated CX program.”
Read the entire NAF customer success story here.
If your company would like to be featured in a future Customer Spotlight column, contact Experience.com’s CMO Michael Donner at [email protected].
Interview with
Rick Arvielo
Rick Arvielo, self-taught entrepreneur with a passion for marketing, founded his third business, New American Funding in 2003. Rick’s proven formula of marrying marketing and proprietary technology to grow businesses from the ground up has led to the continuing success of his latest endeavor.
